April 24, 2023

Can you evacuate a person?

In an old episode of "The Wire," a newspaper reporter wrote in an article that people were “evacuated” from a burning building. Wrong, her editors tell her. You don’t “evacuate” a person from a building. To evacuate a person, her editors tell her, means “to give them an enema.”

It was an amusing moment in the show made more interesting by the fact that the show’s creator, David Simon, is a former Sun editor. It gets even more interesting when the reporter picks up a copy of “Webster’s New World” dictionary — the Associated Press Stylebook’s designated dictionary and therefore the very one that newsroom would use — and affirming that, yes, the editors were right. “Evacuate” cannot be used to describe removing people from a building.

The tone of the newsroom banter rang true. Professional wordsmiths spend a lot of time talking about such usage matters. But the content of the conversation — the stuff aobut “evacuate” — well, I just wasn’t buying it. The fact that the show knew which dictionary to use had impressed me so much that I almost believed they were telling viewers the truth about its contents. But not quite.

So I picked up my own copy of “Webster’s New World.”

The first two definitions show that to “evacuate” a person can indeed mean to give him an enema. They are: 1. to make empty; remove the contents of; specif., to remove air from so as to make a vacuum; and 2. to discharge (bodily waste, esp. feces).

But the third definition was different:

3. to remove (inhabitants, etc.) from (a place or area), as for protective purposes

That means that you can evacuate a person by removing him or her from a place. And it contains another lesson, too. Never get your facts from people whose primary job is to entertain.

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April 17, 2023

5 pro tips for using the space bar

Nothing says “This was written by an amateur” like … nothing. White space. Blank space. The number of times you hit that long button at the bottom of a keyboard. Knowing when to insert a space can give your writing top-tier professional polish. Sound like a goal? Here are five pro tips for using the space bar.

1. Single space between sentences.
2. Put a space before an ellipsis.
3. Know when to space around dashes.
4. Know when to space between initials.
5. Check a dictionary for spacing between words.

1. Single space between sentences.

The question of whether to put one space or two after a period or other terminal punctuation mark is hotly debated and highly controversial. That’s ridiculous. There’s no controversy here.

For decades, the professional publishing world has followed the standard of using just one space between sentences. That’s true for both book publishing and news media. Even longtime holdout the Modern Language Assn., which guides students on how to write papers, now agrees, saying the only time you would put two spaces between sentences is when your teacher or professor prefers it.

2. Put a space before an ellipsis.

An ellipsis, a series of three dots that indicate that words were cut out or someone trailed off mid-thought, is always preceded by a space … like this. But if you’ve ever looked closely, you might have noticed that sometimes it sure looks like the first dot touches the word in front of it. Sometimes it even looks like there are four dots, not three, and the first one touches the word before it. I can explain.

When the text before an ellipsis is a complete sentence, the rules say you end that sentence with a period. Then you insert a space and then the three-dot ellipsis. … Computers often reformat this series to make it look like four dots in a row, with no spaces between them. But in fact, what you’re seeing is period, space, period, period, period. So technically there’s still a space in front of the ellipsis. When the stuff before the ellipsis is not a complete sentence, don’t add the extra period. Just space, dot, dot, dot.

Here's the rest in my recent column.

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April 10, 2023

Did AI write this blog?

Recently, author Neil Gaiman posted on Mastodon a link to a blog titled “The 20 Best Lou Reed Songs of All Time” with this comment: “the first time I’ve read an article that I could swear was generated by AI. Whenever it actually describes the lyrical content of a song it’s either slightly wrong, very wrong, or so generalized as to be possibly talking about any possible song.”

I don’t know much about music, but I know a little about writing, so I was curious whether the form was as revealing as the substance. It was.

Here are the first two sentences about song No. 10: “How Do You Think It Feels” is a track from Lou Reed’s 1973 album “Berlin.” The song is a haunting ballad that explores themes of heartbreak, loneliness and despair.

Now song No. 11: “Disco Mystic” is a track from Lou Reed’s 1979 album “The Bells.” The song is a funky, upbeat track that features a driving bassline and infectious rhythm.

No. 12: “Ennui” is a track from Lou Reed’s 1974 album “Sally Can’t Dance.” The song is a laid-back, jazzy track that features a smooth saxophone solo and Reed’s trademark deadpan vocals.

No. 13: “Kicks” is a track from Lou Reed’s 1976 album “Coney Island Baby.” The song is a fast-paced, guitar-driven track that showcases Reed’s trademark snarling vocals.

I don’t know whether this unbylined blog was written by a computer or by a cat walking on a keyboard. But a human writer seems unlikely. In all my years of editing writers good and bad, I’ve never seen anyone use identical sentence structures on repeat. For every entry, the first sentence had as its subject either the song title, the words “the song” or a synonym, all followed by “is” then another synonym for “song,” often “track.” Then they repeat Lou Reed’s full name, followed by a year, followed by an album title.

At their heart, all 20 first sentences say, “The song is a song.” Here in my recent column is a closer look at why the writing seems not human, plus a look at how real, talented writers might do it.

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April 3, 2023

Danglers can be tricky

Here’s a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks while editing recently: “By purging these bacteria from your gut, online health gurus and supplement marketers claim that probiotics can improve your overall health.”

It sounds fine and the meaning is clear. So this sentence is OK. But editors don’t settle for OK. We aim for precise, unambiguous sentences in which the words say exactly what the writer meant. By editor standards, this sentence didn’t cut it.

Don’t see anything wrong? Ask yourself who, exactly, is doing the purging? As written, this sentence says that health gurus and marketers are doing the purging: “By purging … health marketers say.” That’s not what the writer meant.

Readers naturally expect that the first noun after a modifying phrase is the person or thing the phrase applies to. But when the wrong noun is in that position, the phrase doesn’t attach properly. Instead, it dangles.

A simplified example: “By purging voters, the registrar was breaking the law.” See how the subject of the main clause, “the registrar,” is clearly the one who was doing the purging? But shuffle that around and the intended meaning gets lost: “By purging voters, the election was skewed by the registrar.” Technically, we’re saying that the election purged the voters because “the election” comes right after the modifying phrase.

So here, the phrase “by purging” is a dangler because it doesn’t connect properly to the thing it applies to: the registrar.

The dangler in our original sentence is easy to fix. After “claim,” just delete the word “that” and insert a comma: “By purging these bacteria from your gut, online health gurus and supplement marketers claim, probiotics can improve your overall health.”

Our new comma works with the first one to set off the whole bit about gurus and marketers as parenthetical information.

Ensconced in commas, this clause signals that this is an aside — not the subject of “by purging.” That will come later in the next bit which begins with “probiotics” — the correct subject of “by purging.”

Here’s another dangler that caught my eye recently: One day while working on the farm with her father, they came across a wasps’ nest.

This one makes my head hurt. It was in a story profiling an entrepreneur, so it was clear at this point in the story who “her” referred to. But who do we mean by “they”? Obviously, it would mean both the entrepreneur and her father were it not for one little problem: the first part of the sentence dangles. Why? Because it’s about one person — the person who was working with her father. “They” suggests they were both working with her father, even though one of them was her father. Hence my headache.

To fix this, change the structure of the opening phrase: “One day while she and her dad were working on the farm.” By making this a complete clause, containing both a subject and a verb, you no longer have the modifying participle “working” looking for a subject to attach to. You already gave “working” its subject. So when the word “they” comes up, it’s a logical reference to both the woman and her father.

Another alternative that eliminates the dangler: One day while she was working on the farm with her father, the pair came across a wasps’ nest.

Danglers like these aren’t a huge problem because the reader easily gets the meaning. But if you want to write with precision, make sure that the first noun after a modifying phrase is the person or thing the phrase applies to.

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March 27, 2023

One consortium, two ... consortiums?

Recently, I was editing an article and came across a reference to a consortium, then to another consortium, then (here it comes) to two consortiums.

I didn’t want to futz with it. I liked it fine. And the tendency I’ve seen in some people to go all Julius Caesar when forming the plural of any Latin noun always struck me as a bit much. I’m talking about the people who lunge at the chance to use “memoranda” without even considering whether it should be “memorandums” because, hey, that’s how you’d do it in ancient Rome.

This may be a good way to justify how they spent a couple precious semesters in high school, but it’s not a good policy for forming plurals. In fact, if you did this with memorandum, you’d be making a bad call.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary allows both “memorandums” and “memoranda” as the plural of “memorandum.” But it prefers “memorandums.” And editing styles usually defer to their dictionaries’ preferred forms, in part because it helps ensure consistency. Otherwise, if editors chose whichever correct form they wanted, some would choose “memorandums” and others would choose “memoranda” and a publication that didn’t watch such things could have all kinds of inconsistencies.

So when I saw “consortiums” I really didn’t want to be that editor who gets all Latin happy on a writer’s word choice. But, of course, it’s not my call anyway. So I had to check.

The dictionary I was editing from, Webster’s New World, says the correct plural is “consortia.” So I had to change it. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, however, allows both plural forms, though it prefers “consortia.”

You can use either one you prefer. Just don’t judge an editor too harshly if she changes it on you.

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March 20, 2023

Worst Comes to Worst? Or Worse Comes to Worst?

I try not to cringe when people use language in a way that seems wrong to me. My idea of what’s right, as I’ve learned the hard way, isn’t necessarily right. So who am I to judge? But though I can hold my tongue, I can’t just turn off my cringe impulse at will, as evidenced by my reaction when I hear people say, “If worst comes to worst.”

To me, that first T is like nails on a chalkboard. How can worst come to worst, I wonder, if it’s already worst? Clearly, the fear is that something already bad — a worse thing — could go even further downhill, all the way to its worst possible state. So obviously, people who use two “worsts” in this expression are botching up the logical original wording, “if worse comes to worst.”

So I scoffed and I sniffed and I silently judged every time I heard the version with two “worsts” until the year 2023 when, after about 20 years of writing about grammar, I finally looked it up.

Good thing I held my tongue. “The traditional idiom, evidenced by the Oxford English Dictionary consistently from the 16th century, is worst comes to worst,” writes Garner’s Modern English usage.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage reports that the expression “worst comes to worst” seems to have first appeared in print in 1597, its meaning identical to the way people use it now: “if the worst that can possibly happen does happen.” It wasn’t till more than a century later that the expression I assumed was the original, “worse comes to worst,” appeared in print.

“Presumably it was the desire to make the phrase more logical that gave rise to the variant ‘if the worse comes to the worst,’ which was first recorded in 1719, when it was used (in the past tense) by Daniel Defoe in ‘Robinson Crusoe,’” Merriam’s writes.

Interestingly, when I searched a version of “Robinson Crusoe” online, I found on page 183 “if the worst came to the worst” — with two Ts — meaning that sometime between the publication of the edition Merriam-Webster referenced and the edition I saw, someone had changed Defoe’s “worse” to “worst” in order to make it correct according to the standards of his time.

This back-and-forth supports Merriam’s central point about the two forms of this expression: “In the centuries since, this phrase has shown a stubborn unwillingness to settle into fixed form.”

Here's more in my recent column.

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March 13, 2023

Feel positively or feel positive? Why the New York Times made the wrong call

“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently.

That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if they wrote instead: “Many older adults feel happily about their lives”? The structure is identical, but suddenly the grammar seems wrong. The adjective “happy” would seem like a better choice — many adults feel happy — than the adverb. So “happily” makes a good test of whether the New York Times’ sentence required an adverb or an adjective.

Well-informed people can disagree about whether the Times should have used “positive” instead of “positively.” But in my view, they made a mistake. They should have used the adjective “positive.” To understand why requires a quick look at which verbs are modified by adverbs.

We were all taught in elementary school that adverbs modify verbs and adjectives modify nouns: Happy adults sing happily. That’s true, but there’s more to the story.

There’s a whole category of verbs that take adjectives, not adverbs, as their complements. They’re called copular or linking verbs, and they either refer back to the subject or deal with the senses.

The most common copular verb is “be,” along with its conjugated forms including “is,” “am” and “are.” Native English speakers understand intuitively that “be” works differently from other verbs. Think about these sentences: He is nicely. We are hungrily. I am sadly. In every case, an adverb comes after the verb and in every case that’s obviously the wrong choice. All those sentences need an adjective: He is nice. We are hungry. I am sad. That’s because the verb “be” is a copular verb. It refers back to the subject. And because subjects are nouns or pronouns, they’re modified not by adverbs but by adjectives.

And there's more. Here's my recent column on which verbs take adjectives instead of adverbs.

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February 27, 2023

Is the older of two also the oldest of two?

If you have two children, ages 10 and 12, is the 12-year-old the oldest? Or is she the older? Can you say she’s your eldest child? Or must you say she’s the elder child?

The answer, believe it or not, is very controversial. Some people say that when you’re comparing only two things, you can’t use the superlative — the “est” form — and that only the comparative — the “er” form — will do.

Even the language bosses are bitterly divided.

“When two items are being compared, a comparative adjective is needed, ‘the greater of the two’; when more than two are being compared, the superlative is needed, ‘the greatest of the three,’” says the 2003 edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage, which calls it a “blunder” to use the superlative in comparisons of two.

Other experts make a strong case that superlatives are fine for comparisons of two.

“No one will misunderstand you if you say, ‘She is the oldest of the two,’” writes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. “The rule serves no useful purpose at all. It is therefore a perfect shibboleth, serving no practical function except to separate those who observe the rule from those who don’t.”

Here's more in my recent column about how to navigate this language issue.

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February 20, 2023

Can you say 'more clear' instead of 'clearer'?

“When is it grammatically correct to use ‘more clear’ in place of ‘clearer’?” an internet user asked on Quora last year.

There are some problems with this question. The first is that the writer was under the impression that “more clear” is the grammatically correct wording in some contexts, while “clearer” is correct in others.
Second: The writer posted this question in a public forum, where people who don’t know the answer can pretend that they do and where, as a result, people contradict each other with absolute certainty.
“‘More clear’ is not English,” one user replied. “The expression is ‘clearer.’”

“The use of either one is grammatically correct,” said another.

No one teaches us in school where to turn with questions like this. Even I found this matter tough to research. So you can’t blame the questioner for seeking out help on the internet, where you can get good answers and bad answers, with no way to know which are right, served with a generous helping of spam ads for stock market tips and software products.

So what’s a well-meaning English speaker to do? First, toss out the idea that there’s only one correct way to write or say something. English is pretty flexible, so more than one wording can be grammatical. Think about “aren’t I” and “amn’t I” and you’ll see what I mean.

Second, understand where correctness comes from in English. There’s no Grammar Penal Code — no official list of what’s right and wrong. Instead, there are three elements that determine correctness: syntax, dictionary definitions and common usage.

Syntax means the grammatical mechanics of sentences, for example how subjects should agree with verbs. You don’t say, “We knows how,” you say, “We know how.” “Know” is the correct conjugation for the first person plural, so “knows” is ungrammatical when paired with “we.”
Dictionary definitions are more straightforward. If you say “dog” when you mean “cat,” you’re using the word “dog” wrong.

The third arbiter of correctness in English, common usage, tells you whether a structure is so well established that it’s considered idiomatic — correct despite being ungrammatical. “Aren’t I” is the best example. The pronoun “I” usually pairs up with “am,” not “are.” But at some point, “aren’t I” became standard idiom, so it’s correct even though it’s ungrammatical.

So how does all this apply to the choice between “more clear” and “clearer”? Here's my recent column explaining why both are acceptable.

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February 13, 2023

Dissatisfied or unsatisfied?

Are you dissatisfied with a recent purchase? Or are you unsatisfied with it? The two words seem interchangeable because, in most cases, they are. But a closer look shines a light on the fascinating nuances of the English language and how we use words when we’re not paying attention.

“Dissatisfied” and “unsatisfied” both mean “not satisfied.” But they aren’t exactly the same.

“Though ‘dissatisfied’ and ‘unsatisfied’ appear to be synonyms, there are distinctions evident in the usage examples in the Merriam-Webster files,” says Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

Despite the word “Dictionary” in its name, this book is a usage guide, which has a different job from that of Merriam-Webster’s actual dictionaries. Usage guides don’t just list words with their definitions. They analyze how words are used, based on databases full of examples from print and speech.

So while Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines both “unsatisfied” and “dissatisfied” as “not satisfied,” the usage guide homes in on an important difference in the examples in its research database: “These examples show that ‘unsatisfied’ is more frequently used to modify nonhuman terms (such as ambition, debts, curiosity, demands, claims) than human ones and that in all instances the meaning is generally of something or someone being ‘unfulfilled’ or ‘unappeased.’”

Clearly, the idea of an unsatisfied debt relies on a specific definition of “satisfy”: to carry out the terms of something, like a contract, or to meet a financial obligation. The idea of a dissatisfied customer builds on a different definition: to make happy, please or appease.

But that doesn’t explain why the two terms use different prefixes. Both “un-” and “dis-” have multiple definitions, but none that can make sense of the differences between “dissatisfied” and “unsatisfied.” Apparently, “dis-” just hitched itself to the “happy” meaning of “satisfied” while “un-” teamed up with the contractual or financial meaning.

These words aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s nothing wrong with saying you’re unsatisfied with your purchase. But, fascinatingly, you would never say a debt is dissatisfied, which would seem to suggest that the debt is a living creature with feelings.

All this brings to mind a more famous controversy around a similar word pair: disinterested and uninterested. The kerfuffle started in the early 1950s when language experts started complaining that “disinterested” was being widely misused and that misuse was eroding a helpful and “elegant” distinction.

“Disinterested,” these folks said, didn’t mean not interested. It meant impartial. As one expert put it in 1970, “The umpire, ideally, would be disinterested; the one who did not care about the game would be uninterested.”

So in this view, if you said you were disinterested in pop music or history or your uncle’s war stories, you would be saying something different from what you meant.

But like so much of the language fussiness that came into fashion in the 1950s, this idea is a little misguided. It was never true that “disinterested” originally meant impartial and that this original definition was eroding due to sloppy usage. Merriam’s usage guide examines Oxford English Dictionary entries going back to the early 1600s to show that this belief is “erroneous.”

“The OED shows that the earlier sense of ‘disinterested’ is the simple negative of ‘interested,’” Merriam’s reports. There’s no evidence it meant “impartial” until a half century later. Meanwhile, “uninterested” has done an about-face: When it first appeared in the 1700s, “uninterested” meant impartial or fair in the way that “disinterested” does today.

So anyone who thinks the distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested” has been going downhill can rest assured that the words today are closer to their original meanings than they were 50 or 60 years ago.

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